


Her Many Tears

by earlieststar



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Bullying, F/F, Gen, High School AU, Hurt/Comfort, and is way too precious for this cruel cruel world, death mention, luna is friends with a lot of people
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-08
Updated: 2015-02-08
Packaged: 2018-03-11 00:42:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3309311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earlieststar/pseuds/earlieststar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Luna watches Cho Chang crying a lot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Her Many Tears

Luna Lovegood watches Cho Chang crying a lot. She doesn’t like seeing the grief on the girl’s eyes, nor the out of air hiccupping of hers. She just stands there and sees Cho while she is not seen – she knows grief and she recognizes it on the girl. Luna Lovegood admires Cho Chang intensely, upon that; the way she lets the tears fall, unashamed, unapologetic, and just holds herself together.  
She knows what they say about her. Pitiful puns with Luna’s name screamed from across hallways, her notebooks and pencils and sometimes even her shoes nowhere to be seen and the barely covered smirks under mean students’ hands. They mock her for dreaming, for answering kindly to their snark, for treading softly on this world.  
But she always finds her things and she doesn’t need to look at them, or listen to them. They don’t know her.  
Luna also knows what they say about Cho. That she’s overemotional. That she shouldn’t be crying anymore. That she is too young and didn’t know love enough to be like that. She wonders if Cho listens to them, if that is how she feels. If all of these things are true because they know her in ways they don’t know Luna. If that’s why she never stopped crying.  
She doesn’t think so.

Everyone knows the story, and most of them were there to see it. Cedric was murdered – a precise shot on his forehead –, in the middle of a great athletic competition, in front of the whole school. He was a top class student, star of the soccer team and boyfriend to the perfect, beautiful, straight-A-student Cho Chang.  
Luna was at home, painting constellations on the roof of her room, trying to make it look like the sky could fit inside the four walls, when it all happened. While Luna washed away the paint from her fingers, Cho’s tears rolled down her cheeks, unstoppable, dirtying her pale skin with mascara and blood stuck under her nails as she caressed her boyfriend’s hair.

Luna already knew the girl’s favorite places: the back stairs of the oldest building of the school, the science lab after four thirty pm (which the teacher had given her the key to), the table by the window on the back corner of the coffee shop, the swingset on the square on Luna’s street that she reached by bicycle.  
Cho didn’t know hers: the art studio of their school, the balcony chairs of the hipster café that Harry worked in and always got her this complicated, weird and amazing coffees, her father’s room that smelled of cinnamon, the top of the tree her mother had carved their names and smiled and eaten pie with her only a few hours before getting ran over by Luna’s school bus on her first day.

It was a snowy morning of November when Luna Lovegood was called to stand up and read her work for the class. Professor Flitwick, from his chair, smiled at her for encouragement. But her silence had never been fear. It had been caution, willingness to watch and listen, to always know her surroundings. Her voice was kind and clear as she went through her essay in the subject of probabilities of horoscopes being correct or not and their scientific value.  
When she finished, she grinned widely at the teacher, put her sheets on his table and skipped to her place unironically happy. She felt the stares of the rest of her class.  
Harry Potter gave her two thumbs up and she knew he didn’t understand a word of her work.  
Hermione gave her a half smile and she knew she didn’t take it seriously, but had been attentive to all of it.  
Ron looked confused, which only meant he tried to understand, and she was happy.  
Neville praised her work sincerely in a hushed voice and handed her a note.  
Inside of the folded paper, Cho Chang had doodled Luna surrounded by the Chinese zodiac and scribbled in perfect cursive ‘You were the only reason why I listened to this class at eight am instead of wondering about the pros and cons of skipping the next four times’.  
When Luna looked at Cho, the girl was shining under the recently dawned sun, her lips barely curving in a smile, and she nodded her head in the unique way her upbringing earned her. It was beautiful, but more like a picture and less like the person who feels everything so much, who intensely weeps for all the things happening around her.  
Luna likes Cho better when she’s crying.

In the library, Gina tells her that she envies her. Luna asks why.  
“You are always so light, so… Easy, you know?,” she says, her red hair looking like fire on the artificial lighting of the room. “You’re so open to everyone and they try to harm you using it, but it’s like not even gravity can hold you down for long enough.”  
Luna giggles, elbows her in the ribs. “Why would you envy that? I mean, if that is so, someday I might just float away, won’t I? That’s terrifying.”  
“We won’t let you go far, don’t worry, hun,” Gina smiles and kisses her cheek playfully, putting a strand of hair behind her ear.  
“Even so, you don’t need to envy me, Gin,” you are wonderful and open and fiery and intimidating and so kind and you only don’t hover over the ground too because it wants so fiercely to follow your steps. “What you do need is study about genetics, now go.”  
Gina dutifully opens another book and immediately starts transcribing the words on her notebook, mechanically, biting her lip without losing the pleased tones on her expression. Luna french braids the ginger hair and quizzes her every now and then.

Luna gets cornered by Cho Chang on a Friday.  
“How can you smile like that? How can you be so unaffected?,” her voice is melodious and honest. Her hair seems much smoother from up close, blacker than coal and falling over her shoulders like it is perfectly content.  
Luna looks at her open mouthed and stares at her eyes almost wet, so true, so unguarded, glistening. Luna wants to make her smile.  
“I don’t know.”  
Cho lets out a laugh, that kind a person does that sounds a bit like coughing, and she is crying, but she doesn’t look sad, just whole.

The wool of Cho Chang’s oversized sweater is soft, probably her grandmother’s work, and Luna holds it tight. The earrings on Cho’s ears are simple white pearls contrasting with a black ocean. The blue tight high socks feel nice against Luna’s knees.  
Cho Chang’s lips are coated in watermelon gloss and they feel warm and magic over Luna’s.  
Cho is smiling and crying at the same time and Luna feels a spark on her skin that spreads inside of her – she wouldn’t mind burning away right there.

Harry cries on her shoulder on a Sunday evening, on the couch of her living room. Lupin, their ex-teacher, makes chamomile tea on her kitchen quietly. Her father is on a work trip, but the cinnamon fragrance she got to recognize as his lingers.  
Luna leans her head over her friend’s, smiles and tells him affectionately what a big baby he is for crying like that when his godfather just asked him to move in. Lupin comes back with four warm cups, a wide grin that sits well on his face, and snuggles only slightly closer to Sirius Black than ‘traditional manners’ would allow. Sirius is grinning so widely and wildly and Luna takes a immediate liking for him.  
Harry wails over his tea and pouts, but he is happy. Not all crying is for grief. Luna remembers faintly of Cho, eyes her teacher and Sirius’ casually tangled hands, and smiles to herself.

She follows the school’s golden trio to detention for what seems like the thousandth time. She smiles to the teacher at charge (Minerva McGonagall, Biology, the most amazing badass, sassy, awesome lady she’s had the pleasure to meet) and drags Neville to sit by her side after Minerva sneaks all of them cookies.  
Fred and George complain loudly about not receiving treats, but shut up after a while (that can only mean trouble, but also can only mean fun).  
The teacher looks immensely surprised when a messy haired, slightly out of breathe Cho Chang opens the door with a wide smile and hands in a paper that says she will stay with them for having cursed at the teacher who sent Luna unjustly there. She gives the girl a cookie anyways.  
Cho Chang looks satisfied, bites the cookie audaciously and Minerva smirks in her direction, almost content. The girl sits with all the poise she’s surely been taught at home, fixes the hem of her pleated skirt.  
When Cho grins at Luna, she doesn’t hold herself – it is an ear to ear smile, her eyes closing cutely, her hair moving with the wind from the open windows and Luna lets out the air she didn’t know she was holding. Her eyes probably glimmer and her cheeks feel hot.  
Neville coos shyly and they all laugh out loud until Minerva tells them they still are in detention. The twins throw a paperplane at Luna’s head that contains just a lot of hearts and shining emojis. Luna sticks her tongue out at them.

Her father asks her about school over supper.  
“Do they still say mean things to you, Lune?”  
She bites her homemade tofu burger, and shrugs. “They don’t steal my shoes anymore, at least. Just my books, sometimes.”  
“But what you lose always comes back to you, even if not in the ways you expect it to, isn’t it?,” he ruffles her hair and sits across from her on the table, sipping his coffee and smiling at her in a try to comfort. Luna was never bothered by it, but she nods at him anyways, because he likes to help and she likes to make him happy.  
“I know, papa.”  
When she goes upstairs and opens her backpack, she finds her Math textbook, that had been stolen earlier that week. Inside there is a note and a doodle of Luna daydreaming and looking outside the window of class.  
‘Draco will think twice before sending his minions to bother you again’.

Gina pats Cho’s back gently, a worried look on her face while Luna speaks.  
“Don’t need hold it,” she cups Cho’s tear stained face with her both hands, bold and gentle – she knows what they did to her, but she can read on the girl’s eyes that what hurts is what they said (about her, and Cedric, and Luna, and Gina and Harry and all her friends. Luna can almost hear the slurs just looking at Cho’s face). The purple circle around her eyes and the bruises on her pale skin make Luna’s blood boil and she can see Gina’s hands closing into fists by the sight. “You can cry as loud as you need to. Malfoy doesn’t deserve your silence.”  
Cho laughs suddenly and it’s quite melancholic still, but Luna smiles at the sight. Gina is confused, but laughs along after only seconds.  
Hermione and Harry and Ron are exasperated when they search for them to announce Malfoy, Pansy and their friends will be punished for this, and find a cuddling mess of girls half-laughing half-crying on the stairs of the older building.

On the square on Luna’s street, on a strong branch of a specially carved tree near the swingset, they sit. Luna’s paint stained fingers look odd intertwined with Cho’s perfectly manicured ones, but they don’t care. Cho kisses her light hair and she tells her about the stars living on her room, about the wings she does not have and leans on her shoulder when the sky goes dark. Cho sings her old Chinese lullabies, speaks about adoration in her mother tongue and Luna somehow understands.  
They talk of daydreams and being loony and overemotional and don’t shed a single tear.  
Luna knows Cho Chang will cry a lot in her life, but there is something about knowing that there will always be moments like this, when she shines so bright it almost blinds, and she doesn’t need to.

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by ink-splotch's amazing series of studies on the girls of hogwarts and requested by my irl friend Vitor, who also beta-ed it. I also only read the books in Portuguese, so bear with me for a bit.


End file.
